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Hands-onNHL Hitz 2002

After taking a few years off, Midway is getting back into the arcade-style hockey market with its latest rough-and-tumble sports game, NHL Hitz 2002.

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While Midway has put out arcade-style basketball and football games on a pretty regular basis for quite some time, the company's attempts at hockey games have always been shorter-lived. Midway's first attempt at bringing the excitement of NBA Jam to the ice was in 1996, when NHL Open Ice was released in arcades and on the PlayStation. Midway followed up with a 3D hockey game for the N64 called Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey and a cookie-cutter clone of Gretzky called Olympic Hockey '98. Now, with the Xbox on the horizon, Midway is planning to update its arcade hockey formula yet again with its latest entry, NHL Hitz 2002.

Hitz, like all Midway's action-sports games, is extremely easy to pick up and play. It has shoot, pass, and check buttons, as well as a turbo button that enhances your shooting, passing, and checking abilities. The game puts four players on a team (one center, two wings, and your goalie) and lets you switch between the different players at will. The game's arcade roots translate into an extremely offense-heavy game, filled with blistering slap shots and tricky one-timers. Expect end-of-game scores to end up somewhere in the mid-teens. Like in Midway's other sports games, it's possible to power up your team by scoring three goals in a row. While most of Midway's games call this effect being "on fire," Hitz, like Midway's Arena Football game before it, electrifies your players with lightning bolts that shoot down from the sky.

The game will feature hockey arenas for each of the NHL teams, as well as tons of different fantasy arenas. The one we saw had your players skating in an Egyptian-themed rink. Like any good arcade game, Hitz moves at an extremely fast pace, and it doesn't seem to slow down at all, even in the prerelease build that was shown at E3. The players, while maybe a bit plain looking when compared with, say, the players in EA's Xbox hockey simulation, look rather sharp and animate well. Play-by-play commentary is handled by the same voice that Midway has used in the NFL Blitz series.

Fans of Midway's brand of sporting fun will surely get a kick out of Hitz when it ships later this year for the Xbox and PlayStation 2.

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